Finding God in the Trees

The Unexpected Spiritual Power of Paying Attention to Birds

What Photographing Wildlife Taught Me About The Spiritual Life

A Blue Tanager eyeing a snack. Photograph by writer.

The first time I saw a Zebra in the wild, it was grazing idly near the tent that I was renting with my husband in Tanzania. Like most of the animals on our safari, the creature couldn’t have cared less about our presence. We pointed it out to each other repeatedly, as if the other might miss the beast we could smell from our bed. We continued to do this type of excited narration throughout the trip, tapping shoulders and stating the obvious.

Next, we reached for our fancy new long lens cameras. We’d been gearing up to use them for months, and I must say that the satisfaction of snapping the zebra framed by a mountain and in just the right light reminded me of what it feels like to put a book where it belongs on a shelf or to set the table before a party, just so.

Pure satisfaction.

By the time two days had passed, we had witnessed a baboon family brawl and two lions mate on what our guide called a “honeymoon.” When we stumbled upon more zebras, we stretched our necks to see if any cooler animals were behind them. By the end of the week, we were shooing them away from our tent.

Despite the diminishing returns, something stuck about the desire to see more. It filled every drive or walk with a sense of possibility. What are we gonna see next?

I have always been the kind of person prone to thinking wide. My anxiety tends towards the cosmic — death, God, morality — and I’ve learned that if that obsessive energy isn’t given somewhere to go, preferably somewhere closer to earth, it can naturally turn me in on myself.

Two years after our safari, I honed in on a new outlet for my obsessive nature. For the entirety of the two years between trips, our long lens camera had sat in a cabinet. I pulled it out for a trip to Costa Rica, and was thrilled to see how often the country provided me with beautiful creatures to point it at.

Every time I turned around, there was a hummingbird buzzing a rival or a blue tanager feeding on a gorgeous orange flower. A new country is a lot to take in, and birding created a focused lens with which to take it all in.

One night, we took a jungle tour with a local guide named Kokiko. Kokiko had grown up in the jungle and knew it like the back of his hand. He had apprenticed with an Ornithologist studying local birds, and was able to show us a bird asleep on a branch, one leg up, because some birds sleep half of a brain at a time. If the walk was getting boring, Kokiko would make a noise and some curious birds would emerge. He was so attuned to the sounds and signs around him, yet very calm.

I’ll have what he’s having, I thought.

It’s easy to romanticize something like birding abroad, but I was surprised to notice that my new lens on the world traveled home with me.

At first, I started to notice a northern cardinal in my yard. My mother had always treated cardinals like apparitions of dead relatives, something special and rare. Once I started noticing, I realized that cardinals were like the dandelions of my neighborhood bird ecosystem. Beautiful, but common.

The beautiful, common cardinal. Photograph by writer.

I purchased bird feeders to entice the birds closer to the window that I like to stare out of while I drink my coffee. The next day, I was thrilled to see a new bird, what looked like a cardinal but with gray feathers and an orangish pink underbelly. The bird stood on a nearby tree branch then swooped onto my feeder, grabbed a few seeds and then returned to his branch, pecking furiously away at his bounty. Soon, other birds lined up on the branch, patiently waiting their turn.

Wait, do birds take turns? I thought.

I was alone drinking my coffee, so I looked left and right for someone with whom I could share the moment. I snapped a photo of the gray bird and uploaded it to my new Merlin app, which helps me to identify birds.

Tufted titmouse, it told me. I smiled. How had there been so much beauty in my back yard all along, beauty that I’d simply failed to notice?

When I first made a silent prayer retreat, I rather hoped to find God, but I didn’t approach the Burning Bush with the caution one might expect. With the pride of a young person, I swooped right in, expecting to capture lightning in a bottle. Soon, I tired myself out, banging my head against the wall and trying to wrestle God to the ground. With practice, I learned to get quiet, to make room for glimpses rather than gulps.

When I first started working as a mental health therapist, I would sit kids on my couch like little adults, make firm eye contact and ask them an open-ended question about their day. Typically, the child would stare back at me, wide-eyed and frozen silent. Then, they’d look left to right, their eyes saying: what does this adult want me to say?

I quickly learned that direct communication is far too much for a first therapy session with a kid. What I need to do is to get down on the floor to the child’s eye level, usually with a toy truck or a doll house, and focus our attention on a third thing. It doesn’t matter what it is, just that we’re doing it together.

Sometimes, on a silent retreat, I feel like I’m looking at God, wide-eyed like a child and thinking: What do you want me to say?

If I’m sitting there, staring into the abyss waiting for direction, I either go into try-hard mode or shut down. But if I’m on a walk and looking for birds, Grace can sneak up on me and get to work on my soul when my mind is too focused on something else to get in the way.

The birds are, of course, not God. But I do see them as fingers pointing the way to something beyond themselves. And the mindful, open-eyed approach to a bird walk certainly offers many parallels to the spiritual life.

For starters, there’s the lack of control. You can choose a time, a place, and look at the weather, but what you’re really doing on a bird walk is opening yourself up to something larger and hoping for the best.

Like the spiritual life, birding includes ecstatic highs and dark valleys. One day, I walked around patiently for hours looking for birds, and noticing only sparrows and cardinals. I was ready to give up, when I rounded a corner and stumbled upon a half dozen cedar wax wings, birds so smooth and colorful that they look like candles. I’d heard them on my Merlin app for months, but they were usually too high or hidden in a tree for me to see. Here they were, in real life, working their way around a tree like fairies, too busy going to town in their berries to notice my snapping away. Just when I had thrown my hands up and surrendered to the disappointment, I’d stumbled upon something beautiful. Sometimes, the spiritual life is like that too.

Last week, I was stressed about an upcoming family event. Different people had different needs, as they’re want to do, and I felt it was my personal responsibility to fulfill all of them.

I was by my window, strewing on how to please everyone when I heard the powerful “keeee-aarrr” of a red-tailed hawk. My eyes searched for the source, but found only a blue jay, mimicking the local predator.

A year after our Costa Rican trip, I had trained my ears to listen for the morning chorus of birds in my yard. The chorus had stopped three days earlier, and my ears perked up. Something was going on out there.

I combined my observations with some research and began to piece it together. August had just become September and the birds were preparing for an upcoming migration. The whole ecosystem was changing. Some birds were laying low. Others were coming or going. Predators were taking note and the Blue Jays were either mimicking hawks to scare competitors for bird seed or warning friends of real danger.

As I processed the information, I forgot the naggy little voice in my head, the one that likes to exaggerate my role in the order of things. When I came to, I remembered that the voice wasn’t the only voice, but one part of a larger chorus of chirps and squawks that wax and wane as the seasons come and go. And I felt small again, in the best kind of way.